Error Theory

Moral science has two halves. There are the implications of thinking straight about fact and value (ideal theory) and there are the implications of not thinking straight. Ideal theory is the foundation, error theory the daily battle.

Monday, April 26, 2010

The Islamic ban on depictions of Muhammad is NOT because such depictions are offensive

The usually not-so-clueless James Taranto follows the consistently clueless Ann Althouse today in likening "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day" to the Piss-Christ "art" of Andres Serrano.

"... depictions of Muhammad offend millions of Muslims who are no part of the violent threats," writes Althouse: "In pushing back some people, you also hurt a lot of people who aren't doing anything ..."

Sorry Ann, but your premise--that Muslims are somehow offended by the mere depiction of Muhammed--is WRONG. The Islamofascists like to pretend offense because they want excuses to threaten and commit murder, but the actual prohibition on depictions of Muhammad has nothing to do with offense. It is to avoid the risk of Muslims committing idolatry. Since infidels are at no risk of idolatrizing Muhammad, this concern does not apply to infidel art, a point that was made by one of the Jyllands-Posten cartoonists in 2005:

If Muhammad were to be depicted in an insulting manner, then there might be grounds for offense, but the only actually insulting Muhammad cartoons (the ones depicting Muhammad as a pig, a pedophile, and having sex with a dog) were the product of Islamic clerics, who used the images to better inflame the Islamic street to commit mass murder.

The only Jyllands-Posten depictions that were even critical of Muhammad were the turban-bomb Muhammad, the censor-rage Muhammad, and the afraid-to-draw-Muhammad Muhammad. Note that to take offense at these "don't call me 'violent' or I'll kill you" jokes is objectively irrational. To people who believe that Muhammad DID demand for death for insult, having Muhammad depicted as demanding death for insult is NOT INSULTING. It is what they actually believe.

According to the historical accounts that orthodox Islam holds to be accurate, Muhammad did demand death for insult (the basis of the Islamic death penalty for blasphemy). Maybe this is causing some confusion. Maybe Muslims who see Muhammad being depicted as murderous are assuming that the drawings were done by orthodox Muslims, and hence run the risk of idolatry. (That's a joke.)

What about Muslims who are insulted by the idea that Muhammad was violent, despite the orthodox belief that he was in fact violent? There are such Muslims. They are the reformers, and what they are offended by is orthodox Islam, not by cartoons that accurately depict orthodox Islamic beliefs about Muhammad, which is the worst that any infidel cartoonist has done.

For Althouse and Taranto to equate the gratuitous ugliness of Andres Serrano's Piss-Christ "art" to mild criticism of orthodox Islam's actual don't-call-me-violent-or-I'll-kill-you insanity to is, well, not as insane as orthodox Islam, but that isn't saying much.

In particular, the Muhammad drawings by Everybody Draw Muhammad Day founder Molly Norris are completely innocuous. Putting Muhammad's face on a coffee cup, a spool of thread, etcetera, she was intentionally trying to be as whimsical and non-insulting as possible, just as most of the Jyllands-Posten cartoonists were doing. This is what the New York Times and the rest of our Democrat media outlets hid when the censored the Danish cartoons: that the cartoons were not insulting.

It should have been clarified at that time that the actual basis of the Islamic ban on depictions of Muhammad is to avoid Idolatry and that mere depiction of Muhammad by infidels is not considered offensive under Islamic principles. Since the Danish cartoons were not insulting in their content, the whole outrage was a sham. Now Althouse and Taranto are perpetuating this fraud. Even to the Islamofascists, mere depiction of Muhammad is not an insult (much as they pretend otherwise). Piss-Christ IS an insult. The two should not be equated.

Because of the censoring of this debate, American's are now self-censoring all kinds of things that even Sharia law would not censor. The Islamic supremacists love to see this avidity of prostration. Their religion is not called "submission" for nothing. But any liberty-lover must be disgusted by this competition to see who can be the most submissive to totalitarian wishes.

Friday, April 16, 2010

FBI director tries to warn about home grown Islamic terrorists, without mentioning "Islam"

In Senate testimony, Robert Meuller does everything he can to suggest that he is talking about Islamic extremists. He cites Nidal Hasan's mass murder of American soldiers at Fort Hood. He cites Mumbai attacks planner David Headley. But thanks to Obama's banning of any reference to Islam in relation to terror threats, Meuller is unable to specify that it isn't animal rights activists or disgruntled taxpayers who he is calling "an equally serious threat" as al Qaeda. He can only describe the danger as "US-born extremists," of no particular persuasion.

Not allowed to name the enemy, Meuller sounds like Ray Charles telling Stevie Wonder how to steer the car:

"These terrorist threats are diverse, far-reaching and ever-changing, and to combat these threats, the FBI must sustain our overseas contingency operations and engage our intelligence and law enforcement partners both here at home and abroad," he said.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. This intentionally stripped out language is how our intelligence analysts are now reduced to talking to each other internally as they try to conduct business, otherwise they'll get fired. They are commanded to turn a blind eye to Obama's relentless favoritism for everything Islamic, including Islamic terrorists, who can no longer be tracked as such. Mueller's tongue-tied testimony is a glimpse of the barriers that Obama is putting in the way of daily intelligence operations.

President Clinton gave us Jamie Gorelick's "wall of separation" between intelligence and law enforcement. Obama has found an even more effective way to hamper national security: a wall of separation between each agent's brain and his mouth.

UPDATE: Asked for clarification, an FBI spokesman now claims that Mueller was not just talking about Islamic extremists when he said that home-grown threats pose as much of a threat as al Qaeda:

An FBI spokesman said Friday that Mueller was referring to right-wing extremist groups and anti-government militias, as well as American Islamists, in his testimony to the Senate committee that must approve the FBI’s $8.3 billion budget.

Do they really believe this foul-minded statement, a la President Clinton, who now repeats his disgusting charge (ibid) that Timothy McVeigh was inspired by Rush Limbaugh? Or are they required to make their terror warning general in order to abide by Obama's command that executive branch employees not implicate Islamic extremism?

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Nuclear summit logo is an Islamic-shaped crescent

World leader, known for reminding the Islamic world that his middle name is Hussein, hosts nuclear summit, presided over by large Islamic-shaped crescent. (Photo by Ron Sachs.)

It is hard to believe that the State Department could do this by accident:

An Islamic crescent is a very distinct and completely unnatural geometric shape, combining a circular outer arc with a non-concentric circular inner arc. The unnaturalness is an Islamic religious requirement. A lunar crescent has an elliptical inner arc. Using such a natural shape as a religious symbol would risk idolatry (the worship of any actual thing besides God). Thus Muslims use as their symbol the explicitly unnatural circle-in-circle crescent shape.

Sometimes the inner circle sits entirely inside the outer circle. This arrangement is typically used to symbolize Islamic world domination, as seen in the MAS logo. More often the inner circle extends beyond the outer circle, as seen on the last Ottoman flags:

Turkish flag. Crescent covers an unnatural 2/3rds of a circle of arc, give or take (in contrast to a lunar crescent, which always covers half a circle of arc).

Obama's circle-in-circle NSS logo uses a thin crescent to combine the world encompassing aspect of the MAS logo with the more familiar Ottoman crescent, covering less than a full circle of arc.

Obama has ordered his underlings not to notice Islamic connections

Given that the unnatural circle-in-circle crescent is the only widely recognized graphic symbol of Islam, it must have been recognized as such by at least a significant percentage of the State Department personnel who saw it prior to the summit. Why didn't anyone object, forcefully and publicly if necessary?

It would seem to be the Fort Hood phenomenon, where witnesses to Nidal Hasan's murderous ideology were afraid that making an issue of it would be career suicide, thereby enabling Hasan's mass murder of American soldiers. Obama has now made the career suicide threat official, ordering all members of the executive branch to be as oblivious to Islam as possible. The more disturbing the Islamic connection, the more it is to be avoided, to the point where Muslim terrorists, whose reading of orthodox Islamic interpretation compels them to slaughter infidels, are no longer to be called "Muslim terrorists" or "Islamic extremists." Everyone is just supposed to ignore their Islamic motivation.

Hydrogen atoms and Swastikas

Defenders of Obama's nuclear crescent (trolls in the comments at Gateway) think that so long as the Islamic-shaped crescent can be interpreted in some non-Islamic way, there is nothing wrong with using an Islamic shaped crescent to represent American hospitality:

Oh please, folks, get a grip. It’s modeled after a hydrogen atom, you know, as in hydrogen bombs?

This issue (the existence an alternative interpretation for an Islamic shaped crescent) came up when the Missile Defense Agency's crescent shaped website logo became a news story in February.

MDA website logo, uses the world-encompassing symbolism of a full circle-in-circle crescent favored by several Islamic terror groups:

MDA spokesman Rich Lehner insists that the MDA's use of the world-encompassing circle-in-circle crescent shape "symbolizes the worldwide protection of our homeland and deployed forces." But can we really redefine the meaning of an easily recognizable symbol shape that our terror war enemies claim as their own?

By that logic, one could say that the swastika represents a helicopter rotor in motion, making a great logo for our Apache squadrons, but no such interpretation can obviate the established meaning of the symbol shape, and like the swastika, the full circle-in-circle crescent has its own established meaning (a meaning not so different from the swastika). It represents Islamic domination of the planet. For Lehner to protest that this isn't what the full circle-in-circle crescent means to him is as ludicrous and irrelevant as saying that he sees the swastika as a spinning propeller.

Ditto for the "hydrogen atom" explanation for the NSS logo. Having an alternative explanation does not change the fact that it is an Islamic shaped crescent, which every Muslim in the world will immediately recognize as an Islamic shaped crescent when they see it hoisted above Obama's summit meeting. An alternative interpretation cannot obviate the established interpretation, and the established interpretation for this very familiar symbol shape is highly inappropriate for a world meeting hosted by the United States.

UPDATE: Apparently Jon Stewart called the White House, which gave the obvious "hydrogen atom" account, refering to the following atomic diagram:

Stewart was responding to a Fox and Friends episode that arrayed the NSS logo with some Islamic flags. Fox in turn was reporting on a New York Post column by Michael Goodwin that noted the similarity to an Islamic flag. Here is the Fox video:

END UPDATE

Not that it matters, but the NSS logo fails as hydrogen atom

Most obviously, why the gap in the electron's orbit? The only purpose of this gap would seem to be to turn the crescent into the familiar Islamic-shaped crescent.

Less obviously, notice that the fattening of the crescent at the lower left indicates visually that the electron is coming closer to the observer at that point. That would only be the case if the orbit were being observed somewhat edge-on, but that would make the orbit appear to the observer as an ellipse, not the circle seen in the NSS logo.

By the same token, since the orbit is seen as circular rather than elliptical, that means it is being observed from above (from one of the poles of the axis of rotation), which means the electron is not moving closer to and further from the observer, hence no crescent-like fattening of the arc would be observed.

The only purpose for the unnatural fattening of the circle on one side would again seem to be to create the familiar Islamic shaped crescent.

Frank Gaffney was pre-mature in walking back his concerns about the MDA crescent

When he discovered that the MDA logo predated the Obama administration, Frank began a walk-back, which he extended to the crescent shape:

It has also been observed that – rather than embracing the symbolic crescent and star, they could be interpreted as the targets of the intercepting swoosh in the MDA’s latest logo. If so, the 2009 design would presumably be offensive to Islamists, rather than evidence of submission to them.

No, the crescent cannot be interpreted as the target of the intercepting missile, because the target of the intercepting missile is explicit. It is shooting down another missile. The missile shot in the logo can be interpreted as defending the crescent, but it cannot be interpreted as attacking the crescent because the crescent is not a missile.

Ignorant coincidence, or stealth jihad?

The unanswered question is whether the Islamic-looking logos are the product of ignorant coincidence or Islamic supremacism. There are stealth jihadists who work in the field of Islamic symbolism, like the Los Angeles architect who designed the giant Mecca-oriented crescent that is now being built atop the Flight 93 crash site. A crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca is called a mihrab, and is the central feature around which every mosque is built. (Some mihrabs are pointed arch shaped, but the archetypical mihrab is crescent shaped.) The planned memorial will be the world's largest mosque.

Like Gaffney (sorry Frank, but you really wimped out on this one), the defenders of the crescent mosque are willing to embrace untenable excuses for their Islamic symbol shape. Asked how he could abide the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent, Patrick White, Vice President of Families of Flight 93, argued that the almost-exact Mecca-orientation cannot be intended as a tribute to Islam because the in-exactness of it (within 2° of Mecca) would be "disrespectful" to Islam.

After the cartoon jihad, Gaffney and White might be excused for thinking that Muslims will take offense at just about anything, but the fact is, orthodox Islam cares very little about how exactly anyone faces Mecca for prayer. For most of Islam's 1400 year history, far flung Muslims had no accurate way to determine the direction to Mecca. Thus it developed as a matter of religious principle that what matters is intent to face Mecca (and God).

So where did Patrick White get the idea that orientation on Mecca must be exact? From a Muslim scholar commissioned by the Park Service to answer just this question. His name is Nasser Rabbat, and he told the Park Service a flat out lie. Why? Rabbat is presumably a stealth jihadist, though he could have also been doing a personal favor for ex-classmate Paul Murdoch, the Los Angeles architect who designed the Crescent of Embrace.

This is why these possibly coincidental Islamic symbol shapes need to be properly investigated: because where there is smoke, there is sometimes fire.

Gaffney was also premature in dismissing the Obama-like character of the MDA logo

Just because the Obama-like logo was not a product of the Obama administration does not mean it was not the work of a freelance Obamaton, or even an Obama-connected logo designer.

Obama started using his logo in early 2007, when it made a huge splash in the logo-design community. The contract for the MDA logo was not let until September 2007 and the logo itself did not appear until October 2008. Thus the MDA logo was designed while Obama's logo was all the rage, and given Obama's connections in the advertising industry, his people could even have exercised some direct influence over the MDA logo.

The strong Obama likeness makes it almost certain that the MDA logo was created by an Obama partisan as a tribute to Obama. From that strong prior, the likelihood that the Islamic-shaped crescent was also intentional goes up dramatically. Our president does not emphasize the "Hussein" in "Barack Hussein Obama" for nothing.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Nuclear Summit logo uses an Islamic-shaped crescent

[This is the original version of the above post, which was redone for blogburst distribution.]

It is hard to believe that the State Department could do this by accident:

An Islamic crescent is a very distinct and completely unnatural geometric shape, created the intersection of two circles. This is done on basic religious principle, to make the Islamic crescent distinct from a lunar crescent and from the lit portion of any other globe in orbit around a sun. To take a natural shape like the crescent moon as a religious symbol would risk idolatry (the worship of any actual thing besides God). Thus Muslims use as their symbol a stylized and explicitly unnatural crescent shape.

So why is this unnatural crescent shape being used as an official State Department logo for Obama's Nuclear Security Summit? There is not a Muslim in the world who would miss the symbolism here:

World meeting, called by a United States president who makes a point of reminding the Islamic world that his middle name is Hussein, presided over by a large Islamic-shaped crescent. (Photo by Ron Sachs.)

Logos always use stylized shapes, but surely the State Department is aware that this particular stylized crescent shape is the closest thing Islam has to a universal insignia. (Wahabbists reject even the unnatural circle-in-circle crescent shape as idolatrous, making the only truly universal symbols of Islam the Koran, the declaration of faith--recited in the 5 times daily prayers--and the facing of Mecca for prayer, but none of these are graphic symbols.)

Maybe our State Department really is this ignorant, but more likely, as in the case of Fort Hood mass murderer Nidal Hasan, nobody was willing to make an issue of anything connected to Islam, no matter how disturbing, for fear of committing career suicide. After all, Obama has commanded all of his underlings to be as oblivious to Islam as possible. Muslim terrorists whose reading of orthodox Islamic interpretation compels them to slaughter infidels are not to be called "Muslim terrorists" or "Islamic extremists." Everyone is just supposed to ignore their Islamic motivation.

MDA logo also uses an Islamic-looking crescent

Website logo for the Missile Defense Agency.

When Frank Gaffney and others pointed out the likeness to an Islamic crescent, agency spokesman Rich Lehner was scornful:

I don't know where they would even begin to come up with something like that. It's ridiculous.

I showed Mr. Lehner where people would come up with something like that, emailing him the logos of several Islamic terror groups that contain the circle-in-circle crescent shape:

Lehner admitted to me by email that he "wasn't familiar with Islamic symbols," yet he presented himself to the press and the American people as competent to speak to this issue, and since learning that he was wrong to deny that the MDA logo is similar in shape to an Islamic crescent, he has refused to issue a correction. Presumably he has also refused to pass this information on to his agency. He is not just the mouth of the MDA but its eyes and ears in dealing with the public, and he is willfully blind.

Just following orders, which is presumably what happened at the State Department as well. Any order-following employee who happened on the realization that the Nuclear Security Summit logo uses an Islamic shaped crescent would not just keep the information to himself, but would actively try to suppress it, as Mr. Lehner has done. In the MDA case I submitted a freedom of information act request for any emails, meeting minutes, etcetera, where concerns about the Islamic symbol shape might have been raised, but more likely, as in the Hasan case, everybody just kept their mouths shut.

Gaffney's unwarranted walk-back

Gaffney had noted, not just the crescent shape in the MDA logo, but also the similarity to Obama's logo:

When he discovered that the MDA logo predated the Obama administration, he began a walk-back, which he extended to the crescent shape:

It has also been observed that – rather than embracing the symbolic crescent and star, they could be interpreted as the targets of the intercepting swoosh in the MDA’s latest logo. If so, the 2009 design would presumably be offensive to Islamists, rather than evidence of submission to them.

No, the crescent cannot be interpreted as the target of the intercepting missile, because the target of the intercepting missile is explicit. It is shooting down another missile. Did Gaffney forget what the Missile Defense Agency does? The missile shot in the logo can be interpreted as defending the crescent, but it cannot be interpreted as attacking the crescent because the crescent is not a missile.

Ignorant coincidence, or stealth jihad?

The unanswered question is whether the Islamic-looking logos are the product of ignorant coincidence or Islamic supremacism. There are stealth jihadists who work in the field of Islamic symbolism, like the Los Angeles architect who designed the giant Mecca-oriented crescent that is now being built atop the Flight 93 crash site. A crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca is called a mihrab, and is the central feature around which every mosque is built. (Some mihrabs are pointed arch shaped, but the archetypical mihrab is crescent shaped.) The planned memorial will be the world's largest mosque.

Like Gaffney (sorry Frank, but you really wimped out on this one), the defenders of the crescent mosque are willing to embrace illogical excuses for their Islamic symbol shape. Asked how he could abide the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent, Patrick White, Vice President of Families of Flight 93, argued that the almost-exact Mecca-orientation cannot be intended as a tribute to Islam because the in-exactness of it (within 2° of Mecca) would be "disrespectful" to Islam.

After the cartoon jihad, Gaffney and White might be excused for thinking that Muslims will take offense at just about anything, but the fact is, orthodox Islam cares very little about how exactly anyone faces Mecca for prayer. For most of Islam's 1400 year history, far flung Muslims had no accurate way to determine the direction to Mecca. Thus it developed as a matter of religious principle that what matters is intent to face Mecca (and God).

So where did Patrick White get the idea that orientation on Mecca must be exact? From a Muslim scholar commissioned by the Park Service to answer just this question. His name is Nasser Rabbat, and he told the Park Service a flat out lie. Why? Rabbat is presumably a stealth jihadist, though he could have also been doing a personal favor for ex-classmate Paul Murdoch, the Los Angeles architect who designed the Crescent of Embrace.

This is why these possibly coincidental Islamic symbol shapes need to be properly investigated: because where there is smoke, there is sometimes fire.

Gaffney was also premature in dismissing the Obama-like character of the MDA logo

Just because the Obama-like logo was not a product of the Obama administration does not mean it was not the work of a freelance Obamaton, or even an Obama-connected logo designer.

Obama started using his logo in early 2007, when it made a huge splash in the logo-design community. The contract for the MDA logo was not let until September 2007, and the logo itself did not appear until October 2008. Thus the MDA logo was designed while Obama's logo was all the rage, and given Obama's connections in the advertising industry, his people could even have exercised some direct influence over the MDA logo.

The strong Obama likeness makes it almost certain that the MDA logo was created by an Obama partisan as a tribute to Obama. From that strong prior, the likelihood that the Islamic-shaped crescent was also intentional goes up dramatically. Our president does not emphasize the "Hussein" in "Barack Hussein Obama" for nothing.

Wednesday, April 07, 2010

Parasitic government stops fighting actual parasites

One of the few proper roles of government is to help deal with public health concerns like clean water, parasitic invasion, and disease control (in contrast to the private or individual health concerns that Obamacare takes over). In a double perversion, New York's Democrat controlled state government is spending so much on improper roles of government that it can't spare a relative pittance to fight New York's burgeoning bed bug outbreak:

Tucked in the myriad cuts in this year's tough-times fiscal plan, is an elimination of the Cornell Cooperative Extension Service, an organization devoted to agricultural solutions and education -- which means fighting pests.

"With roaches, we know how to get rid of them. With bed bugs, we don't know. This would be a loss in terms of coming up with solutions," Brewer says.

Parasite control involves massive externalities, where individuals face no incentive to account the huge costs that their actions can impose on numerous others. When individuals are not accountable for the costs they impose, private markets fail to coordinate efficient outcomes, creating a role for government to try to fill in for the missing market solution. The solution will still be dependent largely on individual action, but there will be a role for government in coordinating that action, as by developing, subsidizing, and if necessary requiring, eradication efforts.

Instead of fighting parasites, government has become a killing parasite. New York's unresisted descent into primitive infestation provides a sardonically literal metaphor for this moral inversion.

About Me

Here is a short bio I sent to press people covering the Flight 93 memorial debacle. My training is as an economist. I was in the PhD program in economics at Stanford until my research led me more towards moral theory and constitutional law, at which point I dropped the program and started working on my own. I was writing a book on republicanism (the system of liberty under law) for World Ahead Publishing when I discovered that the Flight 93 memorial was going to be a terrorist memorial mosque. World Ahead agreed to first publish my book about this rehijacking of Flight 93 (Crescent of Betrayal, temporarily available for free download at CrescentOfBetrayal.com). This is not my first venture into journalism. Over the years I have been a writer, opinions editor, and advisor for Stanford’s conservative campus newspaper The Stanford Review, and am currently on the Review’s board of directors.